


Draw The Line

by CAPSING



Category: Deadpool (2016), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Gen, Gender Dysphoria, Implied Sexual Abuse, Non-Linear Narrative, Sad Ending, Suicidal Thoughts, Torture, Trans Character, Transphobia, everything is very vague and confusing, if anything triggers you avoid reading this, nothing is happy and everyone dies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-27
Updated: 2016-03-27
Packaged: 2018-05-29 12:28:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6374734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CAPSING/pseuds/CAPSING
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When you can’t see the lines that define you, you have to paint a new reality; after all, what’s in a name?<br/>(Please read the warnings.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Draw The Line

**Author's Note:**

> ATTENTION. If you have ANY triggers – please don’t read this. It has such loaded content, it’s better to be safe than sorry.
> 
> Thanks for those who left me such supportive comments those last few days! Those are the best fuel to motivate me into finishing any of the 22 WIPs I have. Special thanks goes to [Silvermittt](http://silvermittt.tumblr.com) for proofreading!  
> I added a bit since the last version she has read, so any mistakes are my own.
> 
> This entire thing was inspired by the line: “I can’t feel pain. I can’t feel anything, anymore.”

When you are born, you are defined.

They define you by numbers – how much you weigh, how long is your body, by whichever scale ingrained into the people’s mind as the right one for measurements; they define you by gender – an arbitrary concept of classification, based solely on your genitals; they define you by race, by a date, by an endless list of criteria you didn’t have any part in creating.

Then they define you by name.

Frances experiences life like a he’s a pocket dictionary featuring the wrong cover, in a world where people keep insisting on speaking using their own terms, never once bothering to check the contents out.

He defines the experience as _struggle_.

* * *

**  
strug·gle**

/ˈstrəɡəl/

[ _verb_ ]

make forceful or violent efforts to get free of restraint or constriction.

[ _noun_ ]

a forceful or violent effort to get free of restraint or resist attack.

 

* * *

 

 As a kid, he cries a lot.

 

“Frances, sweetie –“

“No!”

“Please, baby, mommy had a very long day –“

“But I’m _not_!”

(By the time he’s an adult, his tears had long been dried out.)

 *

 

Top marks don’t matter in real life.

Employers don’t care about his sharp mind or his extensive knowledge in biology or chemistry, nor about his work ethic or any other qualities he has as a person.

They do care about his cover, though. They judge him solely based on that.

Frances’s cover doesn’t match his content, the resume he hands out isn’t written in the language other people want to understand.

He receives many empty smiles, limp handshakes – and not a single phone call.

*

 

The man catches him at the bus station.

He knows.

He knows _everything_.

“We can make you _you_ ,” the recruiter promises, sweet words rolling off a toxic tongue. “Then, we can make you even better.”

He snorts. “What, like giving me laser vision?”

The man smiles, and a chill runs down his spine.

“Keep it.” he hands him the card.

 

He knows there must be a catch.

(He keeps it.)

*

 

_(“Do you know what I miss?” Angel rasps at him._

_“Breathing through your nose?” he gasps back._

_“Carbs,” she tells him, when all he can taste is copper. “When this is over–“_

_Angel’s voice invites him to live in her comfortable bright fantasy; closing his eyes, he steps forwards._

_It’s better than anything he has ever dreamt on his own, making each bite saccharine. )_

*

 

He grows up to hate mirrors.

But what he hates even more, is the short-haired bitter girl that keeps glaring at him, whenever he looks at one.

(and he hates himself for hating her, because none of it is her fault.)

 

* * *

  **  
re·flec·tion**

/rəˈflekSH(ə)n/

[ _noun_ ]

¹ the throwing back by a body or surface of light, heat, or sound without absorbing it.

² serious thought or consideration.

 

* * *

 

Three months later, after saving cent by cent and forgetting what being warm feels like, his bills are still an impossible imposition by the choking reality he’s forced to undergo.

It reaches the point it’s either his shots or his bills, which is the equivalent of being asked whether you’d rather get shot in your left foot or your right foot.

He chooses his left foot, and stops taking the shots.

*

_(“We women should stick together.” The woman whispers, voice carrying between the metal bars of their cages. “I go by Angel Dust.”_

_“I’m not a woman.” he snaps._

_Then, in a hell hole filled with horrors, the unthinkable happens._

_“Oh.” She says. “Sorry. What’s your name?”)_  

*

 

He loses weight.

He loses his beard.

He loses his crappy, underpaid job at the gas station.

He hasn’t lost the card.

He makes the call.

 

 (Before he loses himself.)

 

* * *

 

**de·spair**

/dəˈsper/

[ _noun_ ]

the complete loss or absence of hope.

[ _verb_ ]

lose or be without hope.

 

* * *

 

Torture is such a wide term with a misleadingly short definition. You think you know what it means, but you don’t, not really. Not until you’ve encountered it first-hand. How cruel can people be? How creative they can get, while trying to break your physical form?

Cruelty is only limited by the human imagination. 

The human imagination, he finds out, is limitless.

 

They cut him, stab him, punch him – and he endures.

They drown him, electrocute him, freeze him, burn him – and he endures.

They choke him until the point where he’s hovering between life and death – and he endures.

They do other things, off-camera, off-record.

(but his brain keeps the film and rewinds it each night until the worn tape bellows smoke and he breaks.)

(The glue him back together, into a distorted version of the original, and paint over the cracks.)

(Again.)                                                                                                            

(And again.)

(Until nothing can fill the gaping cracks anymore.)

 

* * *

 

**noth·ing**

/ˈnəTHiNG/

[ _pronoun_ ]

not anything; no single thing.

[ _adjective; informal_ ]

having no prospect of progress; of no value.

[ _adverb_ ]

not at all.

 

* * *

 

 _Nothing_ suits him fine. When there’s nothing more left of him, all burnt away,

he’s reborn.

It’s a laborious process. He’s thrust out with no awareness of the world around him, only that it has been changed irrevocably. Enhanced reflexes are worth exactly two shits when your existence is completely distorted and twisted, when you float in a vacuum which is reality, awareness so distant from what’s happening it’s like watching other people watching a movie about your life.

He needs to learn anew how to move, in every sense. He can’t stand because he can’t feel his feet under him. He can’t shit because he doesn’t know if he needs to, or if he is pressing his stomach in or out. He bites his tongue constantly when he tries talking, until Angel shuts him up forcibly, her eyes the only way her concern can show through.

The coats are having a field day with him.

He has two years of hell under them.

*

 

( _“You’re right,” Angel admits as he finally tells her, after what he estimates about four months of survival. “That is a crappy name.”_

_Bickering with her is the only way he can still grasp the ends of his sanity, the only motivation he has to still cling to it. His throat is raw, his tongue is bleeding, and those are small prices to pay for living in the present._

_“Told you so. I’d rather be called anything other than that.” He knows he has to keep talking, to keep her conscious; some days are worse than others, but this day sets a new bar, with events that had no predecessors._

_(It’d be easy to let go, so unfairly easy – but then–)_

_He looks to his left, the collar restraining his field of vision. In whichever limited access he manages, he takes Angel in, and wonders how is she still alive._

_“Anything?” She smirks, her mouth a bloody line within the purple giant bruise of her face. She, too, strains her head to the side. He watches as her eyes scan the room (–the throbbing in his muscles is far, far away, if he just ignores it–) then settle on an object, forgotten on the cement floor that’s saturated with blood._

_It’s a bottle of bleach._ )

*

 

With an arduous daily effort, his body manages to learn the new settings it has, but doesn’t bother notifying him of it. Like an AI installed in a robot, he’s stuck in a state of existing in a void. He drops things. All the time. He talks too low, or too high. He can’t tell what expression he’s wearing.

It’s been years after the procedure, when Ajax finally gets to see himself in the mirror. He should be happy – that’s him looking back, for the first time, ever since he was a little kid.

His cover has finally been replaced to fit; only the pages were ripped and stained and chewed and torn out. Now most of the content under is just impossible to read under the hard-cover.

After all those years of longing, of emotions too many to count or recall, he can’t feel anything.  
Not the stubble on his chin, not his flat, muscular chest. Not the two vertical scars that are fading beneath his fingers. He can’t feel regret over signing a deal with the devil, nor happiness that it kept its part of the deal. Not happiness, or relief, or an emotion so strong it can’t be named or even felt fully before it floods you completely and makes you choke.

He looks at the reflection, and it looks back at him,

 

and he can’t tell them apart.

 

* * *

 

**feel·ing**

/ˈfēliNG/

[ _noun_ ]

¹ an emotional state or reaction.

² a belief, especially a vague or irrational one.

[ _adjective_ ]

showing emotion or sensitivity.

 

* * *

 

The first time he gets stabbed, by a person other than the coats, he takes a good minute to stare. There’s a knife, and a wound, and blood, but it’s no more than a picture on the telly or a hyper-realistic painting in the museum. He kills the culprit, than five more, and when he’s done, he goes back to stare at the knife.

“Ajax,” Angel’s voice calls, and he looks up. “You idiot.”

She pulls out a knife from a wound, and Ajax watches as she cleans it, as her thick fingers manage to fit a string through a needle – a feat he could never hope to accomplish (if he had any more hopes, which he doesn’t) –  then as she sews the wound shut.

It doesn’t make a very interesting show to watch, but his eyes are getting only one channel, and the remote is long gone.

*

 

_“Francis?” the patient says, and there’s a pressure stirring in his chest. His fingers twitch. He briefly glances to the person beside the strapped body, meeting Angel’s eyes to confirm it wasn’t her._

_Hours later, as he types in data and laconic findings, he stops and watches his hands._

_His fingers are shaking._

*

 

He’d say he feels contempt for them, but he doesn’t.

He can’t muster it. He knows the emotion, by definition; objectively, he knows that, as some point in the past ( _in his past_ ), he also experienced it, but he can’t recall anything about it other than those dry facts. It’s like trying to determine the colour of a dress in a film noir movie; most chances it was red, but you can never be sure. Still, in the limited vocabulary that makes his life, it’s the closest term he can use to describe what he’d experience each time a new test-subject is brought in.

‘You just dug you own grave, you idiot,’ he thinks as he inspects their files, observing those naïve fools rolled towards his needles. ‘Then shot yourself in the head and fell right in.’

He talks to them for their own benefit; for him, they’re already dead. He’s not sure why he bothers.

They may talk, or cry, or beg, or bleed, or eat, or shit – it all doesn’t matter. They’d be dead by the end of the movie, and even knowing that, Ajax still has to watch and sit through the entire thing.

They always come, like an endless supply line of fresh meat, butchered by men in suits and false promises. Not much different than getting a shipment of new stationary equipment for his notes, really.

*

 

The second time he gets stabbed, he just laughs.

He doesn’t stop laughing for another four hours.

*

 

When he burns Subject 398W7’s leg, when he watches as skin blisters then boils then burns then crisps and turns coal-black, he wonders if the woman knows how precious is the gift Ajax selflessly bestows upon her; those sensations, delivered from his hands to the neurons in her brain . Of pain. Of the immense fortune on Subject 398W7’s part, to scream in response.

Pain is just a concept, now. Just a word. Like happiness, or inter-subjective, or schadenfreude or peace. He often thinks back, to those days of torture, and inspects them anew – and they don’t seem half as bad as Angel vehemently insists they were.

Pain; his world is filled with it, he’s surrounded with it, and yet it all slides away from him, dissipating in thin air, intangible.

What wouldn’t he give to feel pain again. Ajax thinks about it, and concludes he actually doesn’t know, because he can’t prioritize or index anything about himself. He is an empty shell of awareness, poking at concepts, ideas and bodies.

 

There are times he wonders if he’s even alive, then absentmindedly tries to check for his own pulse.

Then he laughs, and goes to share the great privilege of functioning nerve-endings with another person.

*

 

_“What’s my name?” he asks; the studious pressure in his chest upon hearing the answer doesn’t fade until morning. When he brushes his teeth before bed, the man in the mirror wears a wide, sharp grin._

*

 

The first time they’ve met, in dank cells not too far away from their current workplace, Ajax has mixed feelings about Angel; clearly, anyone who decided to name herself ‘ _Angel Dust_ ’ carried a loaded duffle-bag packed with a variety of issues, of every possible kind.

Nowadays, even if he can’t muster any emotion towards her, Ajax finds himself reluctant to leave her behind. (As reluctant as any person who has no preferences towards any action can be.)

They’re a team.

A team that has been strapped into the same beds, tased by the same people, puked on the same floors, broke under the same hands. Angel came out of the experiments strong and independent, when Ajax himself never did. Ironically, she is wonderfully human; she is quick to anger, to act, to _change_.  They have had nothing but each other to count on, as they built themselves layer after layers after layer; Ajax has been redefined by her, in a way he had never been before.

He doesn’t know if that’s what’s called “love” or “friendship” – and maybe it’s both, and maybe it’s neither. But he’s tethered to her and she’s to him, bonded within dreams shared at the blackest pitched hell-hole that linked their fates.

Angel does not wish to die. She is at her peak; given the ability to beat anything to a pulp, to be her own stronghold and guard. Yet when she asks him to stay, it is not with threats of violence (utterly moot) or even with words.

It’s with every time she sews a wound shut, at the moment she ties the string and looks in his eyes, saying “I’m done.” It’s when they sit together and argue over supply routes, and she shoves the bowl of chips before him and tells him to finish them, because she’s already full and it’s an unspoken rule that they’d never throw away food. It’s when she sleeps next to him and tells him he’s warm, and he tries his best both to believe her and not to accidently elbow her in the ribs.

 

Angel is strong, so Ajax bares a bit more. Each day he wakes up.

Just one more day.

Until the first test-subject is brought in.

Until their mutation is triggered.

Until they’ll get to test one more, since the first one died far too quickly.

Until Angel’s birthday, to get her the dulce-de-leche pastries she longed for when their words were all they had.

Until tomorrow, when he’ll find a better reason to stay.

 

Or maybe until the day after that. 

*

_“Ajax!” Angel drops her book as she races to slap the spoon away from his hand, furious. It clanks on the floor; some of the soup splatters on his shirt, staining it red. “What are you doing?! I told you you should wait!”_

_“I did,” he says, turning his eyes to inspect the steaming bowl. “It seemed fine.”_

_The burns on his tongue aren’t too bad, he find out, later. No need for antibiotics._

_They take all their meals together, without fail, from that point on._

*

 

Then she’s gone.

*

 

_“What my name?” he asks, and drowns Mark Griffin, honoured captain of the school’s Rugby team, just like the time Mark and his buddies drowned all of his notes with their piss._

_“What’s my name?” he asks, and electrocutes his third-grade math teacher that screamed at him when he just wanted to use the toilet._

_“What’s my name?” he asks, and chokes those who grieved him time and time again, absorbing their desperate heaves for oxygen like an opiate._

_“What’s my name?” he asks, and punishes them every time they give him the wrong answer._

 

“Francis,” Wilson answers like the pig-headed stubborn asses they are,

and Ajax just laughs.

 

* * *

 

  **Zyz·zo·ge·ton**

\ˌzizəˈjēˌtän\

[ _noun_ ]

a genus of large South American leafhoppers (family Cicadellidae) having the pronotum tuberculate and the front tibiae grooved.

 

* * *

 

There’s a man with a thick Russian accent mumbling moral nonsense, holding back the inevitable. (Holding back his unattainable freedom.)

He looks at Wilson.

He doesn’t feel the gun that’s against his forehead, nor the mass pressing him down; not his extensive injuries, his raptured spleen bleeding into the cavity of his stomach, the metal rod stabbing his through thigh, nor regret.

 

“What’s my name?”

 

He wonders if he’ll get to feel the bullet. He wishes he would.

He used to wish for other things – a different name. Different parents. Different School. Different Friends. Different Jobs.

Body.

Life.

 

At the end, it all comes down to much simpler things.

 

“Who fucking cares?”

 

Wilson shoots.

At the end of the story, when the dust settles

wishes never do come true.

(Ajax already knew.)

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this right after seeing the movie a month ago, then left it for a month without touching it.  
> However, about two weeks ago I’ve reached 200 subscribers (!), and I told myself that when that'd happen I’ll post a story. Looking forwards to seeing you gems in the comment section! ;)


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